John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. John Donne came of age in a high culture whose notions of love were shaped by writers like Philip Sidney. Donne’s own love poetry, though, was very different. Scandalously frank, experimental, intellectually complex, Donne disdains the traditional conventions. Whether praising the beloved or excoriating her, whether writing to a nameless woman in the days of his bachelorhood or the wife to whom he became devoted, Donne strives for emotional real...